Generally, a warm-water cleaning toilet seat jets warm water from a fixed nozzle provided at a rear lower part of the toilet seat and washes a specific part of the human body with the warm water. In the toilet seat, warm water heated to a predetermined temperature is conventionally used to improve the comfort of cleaning.
However, in the conventional warm-water cleaning toilet seat, a method is employed in which water is pre-stored in a water storage tank, is thereafter heated to a predetermined temperature by a sheathed heater or the like, and is kept warm, in order to quickly use warm water for cleaning. Therefore, the drawback of the method is that the water in the water storage tank must continue to be kept warm even while it is not used, and, as a result, the power consumption of the heater is considerably large.
In order to solve this problem, therefore, a method recently employed is such that water is heated and jetted from a nozzle only at a time of cleaning. For example, Japanese-Patent Application Publication No. Hei-11-43978 discloses a warm-water cleaning toilet seat provided with a fluid heater in which a ceramic heater having a heating element disposed on a flat ceramic substrate is used for heating water and a meandering water-channel is formed with a plurality of comb-like ribs on the surface of the ceramic heater.
Since a fluid heater used in recent warm-water cleaning toilet seat heats water during cleaning by the use of a heater provided with a heating element disposed on a flat ceramic substrate as disclosed in the publication, electric power for keeping warm is unnecessary, and power consumption can be greatly reduced in comparison with a conventional type of toilet seat in which warm water is kept warm in a water storage tank.
However, there remains a shortcoming in this type of ceramic heater used in a warm-water cleaning toilet seat, such as the ceramic heater disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. H11-43978, that is, it does not necessarily have sufficiently high thermal efficiency and has relatively high power consumption. Still another disadvantage is the fact that the ceramic heater is easily damaged by a thermal shock if rise time is shortened to promptly supply warm water that has been heated to a necessary temperature.